>>92519
>“Once Ryan asked Kurt, “What are you going to do when you’re thirty?” “I’m not worried about what’s going to happen when I’m thirty,” Kurt replied in the same tone he would use to discuss a broken spark plug, “because I’m never going to make it to thirty. You know what life is like after thirty—I don’t want that.”
>In his hotel room, in the early hours of the morning, Kurt had taken a small plastic baggie of China white heroin, prepared it for a syringe, and injected it into his arm. This in itself was not unusual, since Kurt had been doing heroin regularly for several months, with Love joining him in the two months they’d been a couple. But this particular night, as Courtney slept, Kurt had recklessly—or intentionally—used far more heroin than was safe. The overdose turned his skin an aqua-green hue, stopped his breathing, and made his muscles as stiff as coaxial cable. He slipped off the bed and landed facedown in a pile of clothes, looking like a corpse haphazardly discarded by a serial killer.
>“It wasn’t that he OD’d,” Love recalled. “It was that he was DEAD. If I hadn’t woken up at seven…I don’t know, maybe I sensed it. It was so fucked. It was sick and psycho.” Love frantically began a resuscitation effort that would eventually become commonplace for her: She threw cold water on her fiancé and punched him in the solar plexus so as to make his lungs begin to move air. When her first actions didn’t get a response, she went through the cycle again like a determined paramedic working on a heart-attack victim. Finally, after several minutes of effort, Courtney heard a gasp, signifying Kurt was breathing once again. She continued to revive him by splashing water on his face and moving his limbs. Within a few minutes, he was sitting up, talking, and though still very stoned, wearing a self-possessed smirk, almost as if he were proud of his feat. It was his first near-death overdose. It had come on the very day he had become a star.